If you delete a file on say a computer or a phone where does it go? Especially when it isn’t connected to an internet source.
In: Technology
Think of it like erasing a word on a page written in pencil.
The word doesn’t go anywhere, you’re left with a blank space where it was.
Files are simply put on a disk and an index which indicates where on the disk the file is located. When you delete a file, it is removed from the index but will remain on the disk until it is overwritten.
It doesn’t “go” anywhere. When you delete a file, the operating system merely marks the memory space as available for writing again and clears out the file’s entry in what files it knows about. The file is technically still there, just the operating system no longer recognizes it. As you continue use the device, programs are free to overwrite the space previously used by the file.
No where. In simple terms, space on a device’s file system is basically either allocated to a file or to free space. If you delete a file, it simply takes that space and marks it “free space”.
It doesn’t go anywhere. You’re usually just telling the filesystem to “forget” that it’s there and treat it as empty space.
Being connected to the internet does not factor into this in any way shape or form.
It usually doesn’t go anywhere however the space that file is located on a drive is now marked and considered available to be overwritten as free space. Edit: at least on traditional hdds I’m not familiar enough to know if modern nvme drives do they same or if they actually dump the charge states(what gets interpreted as 1s and 0s from their capacitors). Since nvme has a limited amount of writes I would assume they do similar to traditional drives to limit unnecessary read/writes
Files are just made of bytes of data. When you create a file, it’s like taking a dish out of the cabinet and using it. When you put it in the trash/recycling bin it’s like putting it in the sink. When you delete your trash, it’s like running the dishwasher and putting the dish away to wait until it needs to be used again.
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